There are a lot of opportunities for writers to share their work online; it's very, very careful to research these opportunities before you commit to them. I've been in a few online workshops, and I just don't really have time to produce that much work or spend that much time reading critiques. But always be aware that there are agendas working. In a classroom, everybody usually has the same agenda – they're there to learn and become better writers. There's a teacher there who, ideally, is going to guide the feedback and make sure everybody is sticking with the work and being constructive. In-person writing workshops with mediators can sometimes be useful, too, but even they can fall pretty to those who want to do more than write and get feedback to improve themselves.
I was on one particular workshop site for a while (I won't mention the name, but I think it's still going) that really gave me problems. I signed up, submitted work, and got accepted. When I posted my profile, I mentioned that I have a PhD in English, which of course I would do because I do have one. It's no big deal to me. But gradually the criticism of my work get nastier and nastier and nastier, with comments like, "I would think a PhD would write better than this." They never really critiqued my work; they were critiquing me for actually studying poetry, which I would think would be a good thing to do if you're going to write it. They were writing pastiches of Ginsberg and Bukowski, and sonnets and stuff like that, and I was always as helpful as possible to help them get where they wanted to go. They weren't bad writers, they just stayed within their own comfortable confines of what reading they had done. Because I essentially knew a lot more than they did, they resented me. And this was a big deal workshop where you had to submit work and be approved; they painted themselves as a really high-class operation.
But they treated me like an alien, an other, because I had lived a different life than they had. And this was maybe ten years ago, maybe even longer than that. But you don't forget being treated like you don't matter. And if you're going to critique somebody else's work, don't get personal. Focus on the language and the structure and the intent, not on the person writing it. It's extremely immature, and more importantly, it's not helpful. I spent years giving positive feedback to people I positively couldn't stand, and negative feedback to people I was really close to, because of the quality of the work. Once during grad school when I was going through a bad breakup, my friends got together and said, "You know, Jeff, your work is really sucking right now. It's depressing and it's self-indulgent, and you're writing like a 13 year old girl." They were right; I was. I eventually snapped out of it and started really working again instead of weeping. Sometimes that's what it takes.
And if you get negative, personally-based feedback, ignore it. It means nothing.
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